Two magicians, uneasy tale

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By

JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL

BY SUSANNA CLARKE

ILLUSTRATED BY PORTIA ROSENBERG

Bloomsbury, $27.95, 782 pages, Illus.

REVIEWED BY NICK FREEMAN

This season's "must-have literary accessory," is Susanna Clarke's lavishly hyped "Harry Potter for adults," "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell." An epic tale of feuding magicians in early 19th century England, it blends fantasy and history in a story that sweeps from talking statues in a Yorkshire church to the Napoleonic battlefields and on to Faerie-land itself. There's something for almost everyone here, but Bloomsbury's lavish promotional campaign shouldn't distract potential readers from the novel's weaknesses.

In assessing the book, reviewers have been quick to wheel out their usual responses to a "fantasy" novel, trying to situate it somewhere between the standard reference points of Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. The first represents epic quests, stirring heroism, moral polarities, and no sex, the second, creepy gothic effects, quirky character names and grotesque detail.

In this scheme, Jonathan Strange is closer to Peake, but the resemblance is only superficial. Norrell's servant, Childermass, would be quite at home in Gormenghast castle, but Peake's characterizations and underlying themes are rather subtler than Ms. Clarke's. It would be more accurate to say that this novel is what would result from a less psychologically acute Jane Austen trying to retell Peake's "Titus Groan." If you can imagine such a thing, then you should appreciate the book's audacious mixture of Georgian society novel and dark fantasy.

The novel opens in England in a version of 1807. The Prime Minister is still Lord Liverpool, the Napoleonic Wars drag on, and English social niceties are as constrictive as ever, but these nods to fact conceal a "back story" that gives a very different history of the British Isles. In the Middle Ages, Britain was divided into two kingdoms. The familiar monarchs of historical record ruled the south, but the north was in the hands of a magician, John Uskglass, the Raven King. Centuries later, magic is only a fading memory, but Uskglass lingers in the popular imagination, a figure like King Arthur who will, it is said, return to rule the land once more. In the meantime, magic has become the purely academic preserve of a few die-hard scholars. These men (and magic does seem a male preserve throughout) might call themselves magicians, but they are largely antiquarian pedants more interested in book collecting than spell craft.